One second, Kate's bare hand was resting on the unnaturally smooth, black stone altar of a ruined Yorkshire abbey. The next, her lungs were instantly crushed by a wall of freezing air, and she slammed face-first into a bed of semi-solidified clay.
She pushed herself up onto her elbows, the freezing mud sucking loudly at the bright red synthetic fabric of her Gore-Tex jacket.
She wasn't alone.
Standing less than ten feet away on the rutted dirt track was a man. Under any normal circumstances, the striking, aggressive architecture of his bone structure would have commanded immediate attention in a crowded ER—a sharp, aristocratic jawline, dark hair plastered to his forehead by the freezing damp, and piercing, pale eyes fixed dead on her.
But her emergency room instincts overrode any aesthetic assessment in a fraction of a second. Something was profoundly, lethally wrong.
He was staring directly at her bright red jacket, his chest heaving with a harsh, wet rattling sound. He took a step forward. The movement wasn't a walk; it was a disjointed, erratic lurch, his knees buckling outward as if the joints were dissolving beneath his weight.
Kate scrambled backward, her high-end Vibram soles finding zero traction in the freezing mixture of mud and sheep excrement. She crab-walked away, her pulse hammering violently against her carotid artery, her eyes wide.
"Stay back," she rasped, her throat raw.
The handsome stranger didn't answer. A wet, tearing cough ripped from his throat, snapping his head forward. A thick spray of dark, arterial blood splattered across the grey frost between them. He let out a low, guttural groan, his dirty hands violently clutching at the juncture of his groin and thigh.
Then, he simply collapsed like a cut string, falling face-first into the freezing mud.
As his coarse, filthy linen tunic rode up his thigh, the horrific reality of his condition was exposed to the freezing air. Protruding from his groin were massive, fist-sized swellings—necrotic, weeping ulcers surrounded by spreading patches of dead, black skin.
Buboes.
Kate's breath hitched. A sudden, violent hyperventilation kicked in. Her lungs aggressively fought for oxygen that felt too thin, too old. She pressed her back against a dead, thorny bush, her eyes locked on the motionless, bleeding corpse in the mud.
With dead, bloodless fingers, she ripped her phone from her chest pocket. The screen flickered to life, the harsh blue light agonizing in the gloom. No service. No "Searching for Network." Just a dead icon, locked on the last photo she took of the abbey ruins, timestamped _March 2026_.
Kate looked up from the screen, her pupils dilating massively. There were no white airplane contrails slicing through the grey clouds. No distant hum of a motorway. The air smelled violently of rotting vegetation, raw fat, and undisturbed earth.
She looked down at the abrasive nylon strap of the black backpack half-buried in the mud beside her knee. It was the only piece of the 21st century she had left.